How to Get Backlinks To Software Companies in 2021 (And Beyond)

Based on Statistica, the main challenge to the success of a startup is generating new business. Knowing where to get your next customer is, in fact, hard work in itself.

This is especially true for software companies. Customer acquisition has never been easy for them. It has to be backed up with a solid marketing strategy with full wisdom on particular marketing channels to focus on getting new customers.

With major marketing channels, search engine optimization is still at the top of the priority for most SaaS companies.

Given that it is a free, organic benefit with long-term results, marketers and founders from software businesses knew the potential to invest in this lucrative marketing channel.

However, not all SEOs and marketers can dominate the search very quickly. In most competitive industries, the business has to define its core strategy and implement the right solutions, improvements, and other initiatives to optimize the website properly for search engines and search users.

One of the top-ranking factors of Google is links. This helps Google understand what industry your site is about based on its linking referring domains.

You can dominate the search for your target keywords as a software business by the quality and quantity of links. So either you do it yourself or hire a company that does link building services for SaaS companies.

So, here are four actionable tips to get backlinks to software companies.

1. Leverage Affiliate Partners For Natural Backlinks

If you promote your SaaS product through affiliate programs, you can target affiliate partners for natural backlink acquisition.

Do not only look at affiliate programs as a way to get new customers through partnered bloggers, publishers, and content creators who write reviews about your product — with contextual links on their articles pointing to their dedicated affiliate pages.

You should also see backlink opportunities right at the front, as you can help bloggers increase more of their side income through strategic pricing.

You could allocate a little big more high-end affiliate percentage whenever they link to you in one of their articles — this way, you’re giving them a reason to link to one of your articles, not just to your product affiliate page.

As soon as you have identified what kind of pricing model you’ll do for affiliate partners, you can also offer it to new bloggers and publishers in your space.

With a good crafted email pitch, you can persuade more people to become part of your affliate program partners, and get them to link to one of your best articles from their blogs.

2. Find Shoulder Niches For Content Opportunities

Most SaaS websites have a very specific target audience for their content — you often see that most of the keywords they target don’t have high search volume (like any SEOs would love to see when they start doing their keyword research).

When this happens, content marketers of software companies are struggling to find opportunities externally of their website for content distribution.

One way to solve this issue is to tap niches tangentially related to your brand.

These are blogs and publishers that you can target which won’t go too far from your main target audience.

One way to discover these shoulder niches (as we call it) is to enter your competitors’ domains in one of content analysis tools like Ahrefs. This would help you see topics and subcategories you can leverage for your blog as well.

You can make these shoulder niches as entries for your guest posting strategy. Find blogs within these verticals, reach out to them and offer topics relevant to their readers (and to your website).

3. Turn Brand Mentions Into Product Page Links

Branding is critical to anyone’s business, especially for software startups.

As you grow your business and continuously delivering the highest value to your customers, you get word-of-mouth referrals from people who used your product (and were satisfied with the experience).

When this happens, there would be publishers and bloggers who will start to write about your products. They will cite or reference one of your products as one of the best tools (list posts) or use it as part of their examples.

These are branded opportunities you can take advantage of, given that not all publishers will link to your page (unlinked mentions).

You can use BrandMentions or Ahrefs’ Alerts feature to start monitoring any mentions of your product or brand. Make sure you use any terms associated with your products not to miss any product mentions.

Make a list of all blogs and sites that mentioned your products but haven’t credited you with links. Collect all email addresses of each contact person of the site.

Reach out to them and ask if they could link to your product page as a credit.

It is best to be very straightforward with your pitch to get them to see the value of those links (and persuade them better with simplicity).

4. Create Learn Hubs As Linkable Assets

Educate your audience is still one of the best ways to earn natural links from highly authoritative sites.

The idea is simple. If you can share your experience and expertise with people, you build your authority as a content marketing house in your space. The more you showcase how to help other people with information, the more likely it that you get feedback — this includes natural backlinks from your followers and brand advocates.

You can publish “learn hubs” on your website. These are full-packed educational resources on topics that your product is trying to solve with its features.

Find topics that people want to learn as a newbie in your space or as someone trying to work around with your tools and products.

Most successful “learn hubs” have internal links through each of its inner pages. This internal linking process boosts the site’s overall authority, as search engines can figure out the most important pages on the website.

Do an outreach campaign to promote your “learn hubs.” As you manually get backlinks to your learn hub pages, you help them increase its search rankings, which will turn into natural opportunities from industry content creators who will find it through search (while they’re researching information for content).

Be Creative In Your Linkable Content Marketing Strategy

It is challenging to get backlinks to the SaaS website, but you can be creative with your strategy to earn natural backlinks in the process.

With proper observation on other websites, other verticals, and highly linkable content, you get more natural linking opportunities from sites and blogs where your potential customers are engaged.